Movies
No CGI At All In The New ‘Evil Dead’?!!
Director Fede Alvarez has stated that there is absolutely NO CGI in his upcoming Evil Dead remake. I’m not sure if this statement includes stuff like enhancements or some wire removal here and there (and I wouldn’t care if it didn’t) but the overall gist is that any big, gross gag you might see onscreen was 100% done in-camera and onset.
Speaking with io9 he said, “We didn’t do any CGI in the movie. There’s no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There’s a reason people use CGI it’s cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone’s arm disappear.”
That last bit, about the illusions, sells it for me. I absolutely think its possible to create all kinds of magic (vines coming out of a mouth, arms being chopped off – various other sh*t I can’t tell you about yet) with a little slight of hand.
Evil Dead hits theaters on April 12th, 2013. Head inside for a quote on the insanely bloody ending!
“There’s a moment where a girl goes through her arm with a kitchen knife — spoiler alert. And we knew since day one the camera would start wide, she goes for the knife, you see her arm, she starts going for it. And you think they’re going to cut away at any moment, but we don’t. She just goes for it and screams and the arm breaks and falls. So we really pushed the boundaries there, trying to create those illusions… It has a particularly bloody ending. The last scene is just…I want it to be the bloodiest scene, ever. And I think it is.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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